EU: Online public consultation on ISDS in the TTIP
DG Trade | 27 March 2014
Online public consultation on investment protection and investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in the Transatlantic Trade and Partnership Agreement (TTIP)
Policy field: Investment
Target group: All stakeholders
Closing Date: 21/06/2014
Objective of the consultation
In June 2013, the governments of the EU’s Member States unanimously instructed the European Commission to start negotiating a free trade agreement with the United States. They also gave the Commission guidelines setting out what the negotiations should include. Already in May 2013, a large majority in the European Parliament had welcomed the imminent launch of the negotiations .
In the guidelines they gave to the Commission the governments stated that the EU should seek to include provisions on investment protection and Investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in the proposed agreement. Negotiations for an agreement – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – started in July 2013.
The European Commission is consulting the public in the EU on a possible approach to investment protection and ISDS in the TTIP. The proposed approach contains a series of innovative elements that the EU proposes using as the basis for the TTIP negotiations. The key issue on which we are consulting is whether the EU’s proposed approach for TTIP achieves the right balance between protecting investors and safeguarding the EU’s right and ability to regulate in the public interest.
Tips for completing the questionnaire: The questionnaire is quite long and detailed. Before activating the link to complete the questionnaire, we strongly recommend that you first print out the notice and the consultation document.
We recommend that after reading the notice and the consultation document you draft your replies separately off-line and then copy/paste them or/and upload them into the respective fields in the questionnaire. Each field has a maximum capacity of 4000 characters – equivalent to about one and a half pages of text.
Important: For technical reasons the questionnaire must be completed and submitted within 90 minutes. You cannot save your answers in the questionnaire and come back to them later. If the questionnaire is closed without being submitted, all data will be lost.
LANGUAGE POLICY: The consultation will be available online in English as of today. The deadline for submissions will be three months from the date at which the consultation is available in all official EU languages. Accordingly, the final deadline for submissions will be indicated on the consultation webpage once the texts are available in all EU languages.
To ensure that our public consultation is open and transparent, the Commission intends to publish a Contributions Report on the DG Trade’s website that will include a list of the names of all the companies/organisations from which we have received contributions.
Individuals/citizens who reply to the consultation can decide if they want to have their name published in this list by ticking the appropriate box.
In addition, we will also publish the contributions of those companies/organisations and individuals that have agreed to the publication.
The deadline for submitting input and comments using the questionnaire is 21/06/2014. For additional questions please contact: Trade-TTIP-Investment-protection-and-ISDS@ec.europa.eu
Please be aware that only replies submitted via the questionnaire will be accepted. Contributions sent by e-mail will not be accepted.
Documents:
– Privacy statement
– Consultation notice
– Consultation document
